Opinion News Updates

He sounded very concerned during his last call. May be he had a premonition of the inevitable. He talked at length about the multiple organisations he had set up and wanted me to find him someone who would take charge of his media related activities. I had assured him that I would help him find […]

It has been a long-standing Indian tradition not to speak ill of the dead, no matter how unsavoury some of the deeds of the person in his lifetime were. So, let us discount all that has been said about Atal Bihari Vajpayee since he breathed his last at AIIMS, New Delhi at 5.05 pm on […]

Trust the Modi government to come up with one crazy idea after another. As if the ambitious – but foolish – decision to go for a bullet train, costing upwards of Rs. One lakh crore, wasn’t bad enough, it has now given ‘in-principle’ consent to the proposal for setting up a ‘sea aerodrome’ at Chilika […]

So, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) voted for Harivansh Narayan Singh of the JD (U) in the election for Deputy Chairperson of Rajya Sabha because the two parties had a common parentage: the Jayprakash Narayan movement. [Biju Patnaik, the man after whom the BJD is named and JP himself must be fidgeting vigorously in their […]

It simply doesn’t add up. On February 19 this year, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik boasted before a delegation of representatives from various UN agencies that Odisha had brought a whopping eight million people above poverty line in a decade. Less than six months later, on July 28, he announced that the state would launch its […]

Laxmidhar is distraught. The man from Tigiria, who looks after his family of five with the paan-cum-tea shop he runs below the under-construction Lingaraj Vihar flyover in Bhubaneswar, is about to be squeezed out of his place. “Where shall we go? Please do something for us. Sir,” pleads Laxmidhar, not ready to believe that there […]

Let us not get distracted by the ugly and shameful tug of war among the three major political parties to corner – and deny – credit for the inordinately delayed Gurupriya bridge. Instead, we should all rejoice that a historical wrong has been righted and the people who sacrificed everything to light up our houses […]

It’s the fabled rabbit and tortoise story all over again. In a move that was in refreshing contrast to the lazy, laidback way it normally moves, the Odisha government was first off the blocks in seeking a Geographical Indication (GI) status for rasagola in May, June 2015. But three years down the line, it is […]

As the circumstances leading to the death of Rakbar Khan, who was lynched by a ‘gau rakshak’ mob in Alwar in Rajasthan on Saturday night on suspicion of illegally carrying cattle, come to the fore, it is becoming increasingly clear that his life could have been saved had the cops been a little less callous […]

The ‘Smart City’ had never seen anything like it before. Marooned people being rescued by fire and ODRAF personnel; bikes, cars and even buses with passengers floating in water bang in the middle of busy roads; people having to move upstairs after inundation of the ground floor and going without electricity, food and drinking water […]

The mask has fallen off. The slip is showing. And the jumla of ‘equi-distance’ now lies in tatters. By chickening out of the debate on the no confidence motion moved by the Opposition on Friday, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has proved that it is not averse to cutting deals with the BJP on the […]

As the sordid details of how gangster Syed Usman Ali alias ‘Tito’ built his Empire of Crime unravels layer by layer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Kendrapara don flourished with active political patronage at every stage. The similarities of Tito’s case with the rise and fall of the Dhalasamant brothers, who ran a […]

Naveen’s minders must be finding it hard to suppress a chuckle. After all, their sustained efforts to take the wind of out of the sail of Bhasha Andolan, the unique, three-year long movement to press for making Odia the language of all official communication, by driving a wedge between the key persons leading the movement […]

Of late – since his much publicized US visit in September, to be more precise – there has been a spate of reports and commentaries in the national media about the ‘metamorphosis’ of Rahul Gandhi. The commentators would have us believe that the Congress scion has undergone a complete makeover after returning from his nearly […]

By Sandeep Sahu Amid the symphony of dipped-in-sentimentalism messages that reverberated on Facebook since early morning on Utkal Dibasa today was one that struck a discordant note. “Aame Nuhun Udia, Aame Samalpuria; Aame Nuhun Utkali, Aamar Jati Koshali” (“We are not U(O)dias, We are Samabalpurias; We are not Utkali, Our creed is Koshali,” said the […]